Trees, repurposed industrial tanks and paint were among the modest resources used in the Folly Forest project. Photo: Courtesy Dietmar Straub & Anna Thurmayr
Ever have the urge to take a sledgehammer to a nasty patch of asphalt" Students, parents and teachers at Winnipeg?s Strathcona School, together with landscape architects Dietmar Straub and Anna Thurmayr, turned that urge into restorative action. With modest resources ($20 per square metre), but great resourcefulness, the team transformed a playground of hard tar into a terrain of soft spots for serious play. This schoolyard is no longer a paved lot to park children during recess.

It has become an enchanting outdoor classroom and community park.
The design includes a scattering of follies and dozens of trees sprouting from a constellation of skewed stars sliced into the ground. This primary design move subdued the asphalt while reinterpreting its chaotic geometry of grass-filled cracks as cues to renewal. Surface failures were seen as enabling a resilient return of natural growth. Straub and Thurmayr pitched their strategy as a quintet of interventions: breaking open the asphalt; planting trees in newly exposed earth; filling gaps with soil and a permeable bricolage of salvaged bricks, cobblestones, logs and asphalt chunks; sowing prairie grasses; then finally, welcoming urban wildlife. This wildlife includes not just pretty birds and butterflies, but also bugs and earthworms.
As every kid should know, earthw...